Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi. I am Louis Noel, Longitude fellow and graduate of Rice University in Mechanical Engineering. For this episode, I spoke with Helen Little.

Helen is a mechanical engineer at Axiom Space, but she is also a talented artist and engineer in many other disciplines. We delve into Helen’s unique perspective on how her artistic background enriches her diverse engineering endeavors and vice versa. Join us as we uncover the symbiosis between art and engineering in her life, and how this fusion not only drives her professional journey, but also shapes her approach to problem solving and innovation.

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Louis
You earned your Bachelor of Science in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Rice University but before that you attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston. From our past work together, I know you’re a talented sketch artist, creative writer, and avid reader, could you share what influenced you to pursue engineering at university instead of a degree in the arts?

Helen Little
Well, first of all, thank you for describing me so generously. That was definitely an interesting choice for me. So when I was in high school, I got to do three hours of visual art every day, as part of my schoolwork. And then the rest of the day was dedicated to high level academic classes that were available to me. And by the end of the four years, I was realizing like, I had already gotten the opportunity to really like, put time and energy into art, and not so much into the academic subjects I was interested in, which were mainly science and math. The other thing that I realized is that, even though I really like math, and science, and art, realistically, I felt like it was easier for art to be a hobby, rather than the science and math to be a hobby. And it’s easier for art to be the hobby without a degree. If I really wanted to get into like math and science and engineering, I would need a degree for that. So, I think that that held true. And then the last reason which I didn’t realize at the time when I made this decision, but more so, you know, looking back in hindsight, is that I think the reality is, in our capitalist society, the nine to five work schedule, I feel like it works way better, or doing engineering work. Like it’s easier for me to turn on that analytical side of my brain and a nine to five format, versus doing that with art, where there’s a lot of waves of creativity and motivation that are more difficult to kind of push into that. And I think that has to do more with just like how our society and work life is set up where it’s just, it’s just easier to do it, via engineering versus than art. So that was also a benefit.

Louis
That was a really good breakdown. I can only imagine that, you know, it’s easier to explain it in two minutes than it was to actually go through it. There are a lot of interesting insights that we will get into some of that, so really teed it up well. Your projects at Rice and your subsequent professional roles, suggests that you have significant aptitude in various fields of engineering, notably mechanical and software engineering. For instance, you designed and prototyped a zipline for feeding lions at the Houston Zoo, worked at Epic, the largest medical record software company, innovated in 3D printing with recycled plastic at re:3D, and are now contributing to the design of the world’s first commercial space station at Axiom Space. How did you discover your passion for these diverse engineering disciplines? And how have you cultivated your expertise within them?

Helen
Well, when you list them all out like that, it does seem very diverse. That was not intentional on my part. I did not plan that at all. And the way I kind of approach working in different things or changing jobs, I actually don’t plan that far ahead. I know there’s a lot of people who like to have very linear career paths, and think, Okay, I’m gonna get this degree and do this graduate school and then go to this role than that, that will go to this role. I haven’t been doing that. Instead, what I’ve been doing is just pursuing things and topics that interests me, for the sake of that they’re fun, and trying to not think too hard about how they will actually manifest in a quote unquote, practical or useful way in my life, whether that means like, a career or whatever. Because I feel like I can’t predict that ahead of time and so in the short term in the present, if I’m interested in, you know, urban design, I’ll go watch some YouTube videos about that. And maybe some people will think that’s a waste of time, because I’m not an urban designer, but who knows. What if something I do in the future, this interests that I kind of fed, somehow comes back around and actually helps me out. And I find it it’s so difficult to predict that and sometimes those opportunities only come after dabbling a little bit in whatever space that’s interesting. So it’s like might as well just dabble into whatever is interesting to you today and figured out like the rest later. I’m sure there’s cons to doing things that way. It’s worked out for me so far. But it does involve like picking up new things quickly. That is one con to it versus like just building on something that feels safe and that you know. And for me, I think I’ve just accepted the fact that I will always have to start from zero in terms of learning new things, and just accept that I’m just going to be like, unknowledgeable about topics at the beginning and there’s always going to be a bit of a learning curve. And I think having that humility to admit that I don’t know things is what actually helps me learn things faster, because that means that I’m not afraid to ask the stupid questions and reveal my lack of knowledge in order to fill that lack of knowledge. That’s the only way to really learn.

Louis
I feel like you have a lot of curiosity, I know. And we talked about intrinsic motivation in a past episode. And I feel like you were really leveraging that and as a creative, you can have these ways of dabbling, and then go back, if it ever comes up in a future conversation and kind of lean on those things that you may not have previously had exposure to. But wow, you had so many good takeaways out of there, like especially talking about just trying new things and having the humility to ask questions. That’s really the fastest way to learn.

Helen
I almost feel like I had a false perception in college that, like life was going to be very linear and planned out. But I suspect that a lot of people think that and that’s not the reality, for most people, I think, most people’s lives take unexpected turns. And that’s more the norm than otherwise.

Louis
Yeah, which fundamentally leads to some of that anxiety. We’re kind of teed up as this career path and then you get to figuring out, oh, it’s not all like that and there’s more flexibility in career and you know, what you’re interested in.

Louis
Designing, prototyping and testing appear to be hard coded into your skill set. You won first place at an innovative designathon, created an interactive exhibit at the Houston Weather Museum, and imparted your knowledge to hundreds of Rice students at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, where you started as a junior lab assistant and eventually became the head lab assistant. Could you explain the design prototype test process for our lay audience? And how does it engage you as both an engineer and creative thinker?

Helen
All right, great question. Um, so I take this as the engineering design process, but you can have different versions of it applied to solving problems that are not necessarily engineering. And for me, the steps are actually broken out even further. So, you got to define the problem, research the problem, brainstorm, choose your solutions, prototype, and then test. I guess I kind of like expanded the design section of that and that’s an iterative process. There is sort of like a linear step by step, but at any point in that, you may have to double back and go back to a previous step based on what you learn at any one step in the process. And it’s just a way to sort of break down how to solve a complicated problem efficiently. So, when solving any kind of problem, there is a process through it. So, the first step is to define what is the problem you’re trying to solve. That’s the first step because if you don’t know what problem you’re solving, you may design something for a completely different problem and not actually make a solution that works for whatever is at hand. Then after that is research. So, gathering a bunch of background information, seeing what has been done already, just start to kind of like, give some information to start working off of. And then brainstorming is very important in that it allows you to let your mind wander and really be creative and coming up with potential solutions. And the really key part of the brainstorming step is to not jump ahead to judgment of any solutions, because that is what will kill the ability to be generative with ideas. The idea is just to come up with a ton of wild ideas as much as you can. And then from that you call the solutions and you pick which ones are actually good or seem decent. And then prototyping is actually trying to implement it in a way that is low cost, proof of concept as quick as possible without having to build the final thing, just to test out some basic principles of it. And then that’s when you test a prototype and then what you learn from that, you know, you can always double back. Like maybe you make a prototype and then you realize, you know, whoever your customers or clients, whoever gave you the problem, maybe find something else about the problem that you didn’t realize you didn’t properly define. Now you have to go all the way back to the defining the problem. And then maybe you have to redo some brainstorming now that you’ve redefined the problem. Or, you know, maybe you test a prototype, and you realize there’s some issues with the prototype. So, then you go back to the brainstorming phase, what solutions can we come up with to improve this prototype. It is like, generally step by step but there’s loops within that as you gain more information and it’s iterative. So, you’re kind of building yourself closer and closer to your final solution. There’s this concept known as spiral development, where you kind of just build different things. And every time you re try to build something, you learn from the previous one, and you just get closer and closer to your final solution. Because nothing is ever built perfectly the first time, I think that’s really what it gets at.

Louis
That was a perfect explanation. I feel like that was, you know, anyone could understand that. And you, like you said very early on in the answer it is a process for solving more than just engineering problems, which I’m curious to hear about in this next question. In what ways do you lean on your creative mindset to deliver engineering solutions? And has there ever been a time when your engineering mindset helped you solve an artistic problem?

Helen
Okay, I’m gonna flip this question on you, and actually answer the opposite, where the artistic mindset helped me with the engineering problem.

Louis
Okay.

Helen
Because I started with art in high school and the process for creating an art project actually had a ton of overlap with the engineering design process I learned in college. Usually, when you’re making an art project, you kind of start with, Okay, what’s the general thing I’m trying to make? In school, initially, the teachers would define that. They would say, hey, I want you to make a piece of art that uses these materials, or this size, or it’s supposed to convey this concept, or you’re supposed to use this technique. So, they define certain aspects of it. And then you’re supposed to come up with the rest. So, before you even make the piece of art, I would take my journal and write down ideas or thoughts I have about it, to explore. And then we would draw what’s called thumbnails. So, it’s just like a quick sketch of whatever the thing is, so you can kind of get a general idea. And I would, thumbnail different ideas, write out different lists, and then from there, kind of select out, okay, I’m liking this direction, or let me combine these two ideas for oh, this is interesting, but not quite it, let me branch off and try to do something related. And then once I settle on that, that’s when you like, start to actually execute, and you make the artwork. And then, you know, anyone who’s like a full-time artist, or usually it’s not about the fact that they just made one piece of work, it’s that they have a body of artwork. So, they have made a piece of art, learned something from that, and then made another one that, you know, maybe it’s similar in some ways, but explores different aspects. And you will have whole collections of artists doing like a certain style of work. And if an artist like lives long enough, and does art long enough, they’ll have periods, like how Picasso had his blue period, right. So, it’s really the same in engineering, when you just follow the same engineering design process, with like defining the problem, brainstorming, executing on it, learning from it, and then basically doing it all over again.

And the other aspect from art that really helped me in engineering was learning how to critique. So in art, what we would do is, everyone would be given an art project. And then when the project is due, we hang up all the art and we all sit around and go through each piece and talk about each piece in terms of like, what we’re interpreting from it, ideas for how it could be better, or what we liked about it, what we didn’t like about it. And it’s not just feedback for the artists themselves, it’s also an exercise for the people giving the feedback to understand how to actually analyze something, to improve it. And that in itself is a skill and takes humility too because, you know, when people create art, a lot of times they’re very emotionally attached to what they create. And that can make it difficult to be a little bit more objective to see like its flaws, but you kind of have to do that in order to improve on it. And it’s also really valuable to accept that critique from outside perspectives too, which can also be even, you know, more anxiety inducing and harrowing for people. I see the same thing happen for engineering because a lot of engineers really care about the work they produce, and they can feel very self-conscious about having it be critiqued by someone else and point out the design flaws. But you just got to remember, at the end of the day, you want that work to be the best it can be. And inherently, it kind of does involve being able to look at it and fix the things that are wrong with it and to get help from other people to get that outside perspective. Yeah, I mean, it happens a lot, everybody has a blind spot, or like, you know, maybe they get 90% of the way there, but that last 10%, they can’t see it, and you just have one other person walk in, and they immediately see the issue. And you’re like, yes, thank you.

Louis
Wow, I never really thought to consider that but you’re right, there are really similar ties, especially when you brought in the concept of critiquing, or giving feedback. I feel like we don’t really do that much in engineering in our formal education, aside from maybe when we get put on a group project, then we have to, you know, duel against someone else against a known idea, but sounds like as an artist, you had a little bit of a head start on some of us. So that’s great,

Helen
I can give a more explicit example, actually, from work. So, you know, I’m currently work in aerospace and NASA has what’s called the NASA product development process. And the idea is you know what your end product is, which could be a space station module. And there are all these things that need to be designed at different stages of maturity in order to reach that. So, they’ve broken it down into different stages. So, there’s like SRR, which is you define your requirements. SDR, which is like the system definition. And then you have PDR, which is like your preliminary design. And then CDR is Critical Design Review. And so, there’s like all these reviews at different points in the maturity of a product. And the point is that, at any one of these reviews, the people working on the project create a data packet, and they present it to everybody. And so, you have all the other stakeholders, you have like subject matter experts, senior technical advisors sit in and basically critique the design at that stage. And that’s to, essentially, catch any situations where maybe like, there’s a requirement that’s misunderstood, or is incorrect, or there’s something missing. And so you catch it at every stage so that you don’t get too far along in the process going in the wrong direction, essentially.

Louis
That’s a perfect example. I can imagine like, you need to have some sort of structure to doing this. I mean, can’t just rely on tribal knowledge passed down. Yeah, it seems like having some structure to the process really enables you to de-risk a solution.

Helen
Exactly.

Louis
So some might think fields like science, technology, engineering, and math lack creativity due to the black and white nature of their governing laws. However, creativity often drives breakthrough innovations in these areas. What are modern methods for integrating creativity into engineering? And could you share an example?

Helen
Yeah, I really hate that take that they are separate. And I really don’t see them as being totally different disciplines, there’s so much overlap. I mean, the whole discussion is kind of pointing that out. But when it comes to STEM fields, I think the really exciting part of those fields is building something new. So innovating, like furthering technology, building upon what currently is into the unknown. And so, by definition, it isn’t black and white. Right? Like you are working with uncertainty and that’s where being creative, being innovative is key. I think I heard somewhere that a lot of innovation happens from connections being made between different fields. Which kind of makes sense, because, you know, if something is truly innovative, it’s probably because people overlooked it.

Louis
Good point.

Helen
Unexpected. So, like the best places to look for innovative ideas are where people aren’t looking for them. The big example for that at my current role is, I’ve been learning a lot about space architecture. So, this is this integrated concept of how do you actually design, for example, like a space module or a space station. And the history of this is that initially, these designs were very much driven by engineering and engineering principles, because there were major engineering hurdles to be met for people to live in a zero-gravity low earth orbit, Space Station. And so, that was where most of the focus was put on but over time, people realized it’s not just about the engineering and using engineering problem solving methods don’t solve for everything, such as things like human factors or architecture or like the psychological effects of working in this type of environment. And that’s where like people outside of engineering disciplines kind of come in, you know, people with backgrounds in industrial design or aesthetics or like UI UX and things like that. And I think it’s tempting for engineers to be kind of snobby about it and like, who cares about things looking pretty, we need to keep you alive. But then you have to, you kind of have to ask yourself, you know, it’s not just about surviving, it’s about thriving, right? Like what is the purpose of creating new technology or engineering. Like at the end of the day, these things will impact people, so you have to remember the people aspect of it and like we don’t live in a vacuum.

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Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. I particularly enjoyed how Helen highlighted the value and importance of critiquing and engineering, similar to art. Whether you’re an aspiring engineer, an artist, or anyone in between, Helen’s story is a compelling reminder that the paths to fulfillment and success are as diverse as the individuals who tread them.

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To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

 

Maria Rodriguez
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, my name is Maria Rodriguez. I’m a Longitude fellow and a graduate student at Rice University studying Geology. We are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and communication in scientific and creative fields.
For this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Graham Peers. Dr. Peers is a professor of biology at Colorado State University, where he studies effects of photosynthesis on plants, algae, and cyanobacteria.
We start a conversation on how he found himself in the amazing world of biology. Enjoy listening…

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Maria
If you could tell us about your journey into the field of biology and what initially sparked your interest, and then led you to specialize into studying photosynthesis.

Graham Peers
So, I think it depends on who you ask. I thought my travels here were a little random. And I just kind of picked up interesting things as I go along. But if you asked my mom, she’ll say that when I was a little kid, I was like walking around picking up algae on the beach and messing around with things that I called the green slimes, like, you know, in in lakes and things like that all the time. So, she thinks I always had a predilection towards being interested in algae and photosynthesis and green things the whole time. But, you know, I think I came about it in in a kind of a slow way. I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to do and science initially, and because I wasn’t too sure, I was looking for things that were more kind of like general where I didn’t just have to specialize in biology or chemistry or something like that. And so, I got attracted to the oceanography program at the University of British Columbia, which is where I did my undergraduate. And yeah, it was interesting, because you know, for the first three years, you basically just took a little spattering of biology courses. And in my case, I chose biological oceanography. So, a lot of biology courses, you know, some geology, some chemistry, some physics, I think it was really cool. It just gave me a different perspective on things from my friends who took like just marine biology or just botany or something like that. I kind of stayed in the oceanography realm through my PhD. And then I kind of found that I was more interested with the individual organisms and more interested in how they actually got by living just on light and CO2 and inorganic nutrients. And so, I started to read more and more about that in my spare time. And I’ve just started to get absolutely fascinated by photosynthesis. I think it’s the most utterly amazing thing that happens on Earth. Literally, making something out of nothing is just fantastic to me. And learning about the complexity of how plants versus algae versus cyanobacteria do it is something that still totally fascinates me.

Maria
That’s awesome. That’s really amazing! Are you as fascinated with moss as I am? Because anytime I go hiking, I just go, and I touch all the beautiful soft moss.

Graham
Yeah, moss are super cool! I have friends who work on photosynthesis in moss, but I personally never got into it. They grow a little too slowly for my taste. I am kind of an impatient scientist so I like to try and find things out fast.

Maria
Oh, what would grow faster? Cyanobacteria or just like plants itself?

Graham
Oh, yeah. Cyanobacteria. The plants that a lot of people use for Molecular Biology of photosynthesis, one of them is related to like mustard greens. It’s called the Arabidopsis, and it can go through a full life cycle in less than two months.

Maria
Oh, wow. Very quick.

Graham
Yeah, you planted it immediately germinates and then within a month that flowers and then you can collect the seeds again, and keep going.

Maria
Wow, that is very fast. Can you summarize the project you’re working on in lay terms regarding space biology and lunar agricultural research and share its potential significance?

Graham
Yeah, so we’ve got two projects right now that we work on associated to thinking about plants and space. The first one is partnership with a private company that builds instruments that measure gases and the composition of the air in real time. It turns out, you know, other than just making oxygen and consuming CO2, plants also are interacting with the atmosphere in all sorts of ways. And they also make a hormone. We think about things in hormones in humans as being things like testosterone or estrogen, and they’re in our bloodstream. But it turns out there are plant hormones that are gases, as well. And so, if you’re a plant and you can’t move around, how is it that you can communicate with your neighbors? It turns out that they make this gas called ethylene. And ethylene, if you look it up really quickly, you’ll see that ethylene is like a gas that most people have familiarity with, but never knew what it was. And it’s the thing that makes bananas ripen quickly. So, bananas are throwing off all this ethylene, all the time. And if you put a green banana, and next to a really ripe banana, that ripe banana is making ethylene, and it will signal the green banana to start ripening really quickly. And it turns out, plants make this also all the time when they’re stressed out. And so, what we’re trying to do or what NASA wants us to do is can we develop this instrumentation so that folks on the International Space Station or people on spacecraft or even on the moon, don’t have to be continuously watching their plants? So instead of saying, Okay, going every day watering them trying to figure out what their physiology is, can we be continuously measuring things like the amount of ethylene in the air, and when it reaches a certain point, we could say, oh, there’s something wrong with the plants. Let’s go check on them see what’s wrong, right, because an astronaut has a lot of things to do every day, and gardening? Well, you know, it’s important to eat, you know, it’s something that if they don’t have to spend a lot of their time looking at their plants, that could be better for them. So that’s the first project that we’re working on. And that one’s been really fun. The instrument works, we know we can measure ethylene. But now we’re going to see if we can actually measure when plants get stressed.

The second project that we’re working on right now is trying to figure out if we can improve the growth of plants on lunar soil or lunar regolith, so it’s not really soil because soil here on earth has a lot of organic constituents, dead plants, worm poop, you know, all that kind of stuff. But on the lunar surface, because there’s never been any life on the moon, it’s completely inorganic. It’s just ground rock pretty much. And the chemical composition of that rock or this regolith is very different from what we see on Earth. So even though there’s a little bit of shared geologic history between the Moon and Earth, the metal composition of the regolith, and the rocks on the moon are very different from what we see in the ground up rocks that we see on Earth. And so, it turns out that there are metals, particularly this metal called chromium, which is quite abundant on the Moon, and we don’t see very much of it naturally on Earth. So, our idea that we had when we were comparing the makeup of rocks on the moon and rocks on the earth were, okay, we think that one of the reasons that plants don’t grow well on lunar regolith, is because of the really high concentrations of chromium, because chromium is super toxic. So basically, our proposal was like, Okay, we think it’s issues with chromium. So how can we try to remove the chromium from the regolith such that plants would want to grow on it again. And we came up with an idea of using a cyanobacteria that is very insensitive to the chromium. So, at concentrations of chromium where you get poison for plants, the cyanobacteria don’t care. They can grow on them. They can take up that chromium. They don’t really mind. So, what this ends up being is a kind of a bio accumulation study. Can we get the cyanobacteria to grow on the regolith, suck up the chromium, and then use the regolith that’s been cured of chromium now and grow plants on?

Maria
Wow, that’s super interesting. Have you all tried experiments that plants do grow on this lunar regolith, it but they’re just like really stressed out? Or do they just not grow at all?

Graham
Yeah, so here’s the deal. This is the this is the kicker. Because it’s so hard to get that lunar regolith, you know, it’s not just at your corner store, you’ve got to go a fair distance to get that. So there really hadn’t been very many experiments done on the genuine thing, the actual article, but NASA scientists working with private companies tried to develop fake regolith or what’s called Regolith Simulant. And, and plants will grow on that simulant. You know, they’re not the happiest. You have to give them a little bit more nutrients, literally, you can just give them a little bit of a miracle grow, and that’ll help. You know, they grow okay, not great. There are a lot of people have been working on that, but finally NASA said, Okay, we’re going to release a little bit of the real stuff. Okay, and we’re gonna take a little bit and I’m talking, you know, the amount of regolith would be amount of the amount of dirt that you can like, put on your little fingernail. So, you know, they were growing plants, that mustard I told you about earlier, they were growing that. They germinated the seeds on the actual regolith, and the plants hated it. They’re like, Nope, we don’t like this at all. They were extremely stressed. They didn’t reach the end of their lifecycle. That made everyone’s kind of ears perk up, because we said, okay, there’s a difference between the real stuff and what we’ve been trying to use for the last 20 years to imitate growing plants on the moon. What we found was one of the major differences between the actual regolith and what we see in the simulant is that chromium. So, believe it or not, we only found that out, scientists only published that, last year. So, this is a pretty new finding. So, of course, NASA really wants to make sure that we can try and fix that.

Maria
Super interesting. Wow. And so just from my understanding of plants, just from what you had mentioned, when they are stressed in this type of environment, similar to your first project, do they emit that ethylene?

Graham
Yeah, you know what, there have been some studies on other plants and different metals that show that these plant stress hormones are produced during metal toxicity. I will be totally honest with you. I’ve never thought of combining the two projects until you mentioned it. That’s awesome.

Maria
Just to see if they’re stressed out. Yeah, I wasn’t sure.

Graham
Yeah, we have a whole bunch of other ways of measuring plant stress. So like a doctor might measure your blood pressure, right? And say, Okay, well, your blood pressure is really high, your heart is racing, you’ve got this. And then you also have this stress hormone called cortisol. Right? So, a doctor can measure all those things and say you’re stressed. We have different techniques for measuring stress in plants. That’s actually looking at light emission from plants. So, we think about plants actually using light for photosynthesis, but it turns out, they also emit really low amounts of almost infrared light. And the amount of that light that gets produced gets increased when they get stressed. So that’s how we kind of independent measure stress in the lab. Yeah.

Maria
Very interesting. Very cool.

Graham
All the plants outside are glowing. You just can’t see it.

Maria
They’re glowing with infrared light. Wow.

Graham
Yeah, they’re fluorescent red during the day. Yeah. If you have the right instruments, you can measure that.

Maria
Can I ask how did you come to be involved with this project?

Graham
Yes. So, the first one, I was invited by the company and another person who has worked with the company before. They were looking for someone who had more expertise in photosynthesis, so they contacted me. This other project, the Chromium project, is working with a scientist at the NASA Ames lab, A-M-E-S. And I worked with the scientist there during his PhD. We worked together on algae on things that were completely unrelated to what we’re going to be working on for this chromium project. We enjoyed working together and we were trying to find different projects to work together on and this idea cropped up. And so, we decided to put it forward and we’re lucky enough to get it funded.

Maria
Real cool. Your research involves a multidisciplinary approach sounds like, and it combines genetics, physiology, plant biology. So how do you navigate the intersections between these different fields? And what have been some of the key insights gained from this inter disciplinary collaboration?

Graham
Yeah, yeah. How do you navigate it? Oh, man, I don’t know if I have a good blueprint for that, you know. I’ve always enjoyed thinking about different aspects of science. I don’t like to be siloed or just focus on one thing. And I think that came out of that oceanography degree that I told you about earlier, where I took a lot of different things. I like learning about a whole bunch of different things too. You know, I’m not the best at math, I will fully admit that. And so eventually, I kind of reach a point where I have difficulties and often at that point, if it’s something that I’m really interested in, and I think could be a powerful tool, I’ll try and find a collaborator to help with. Because everybody can’t be an expert in everything. It’s just not possible. And so, when I reach the kind of limits of my abilities, then I asked for other people’s help and I’ve never had any problem doing that, in my career, at least. And so, what happens then is that, you know, as you start to interact with people that don’t have a similar background to you, you start to learn additional things and new doors of knowledge open up to you. So, you start to poke around in a different area. Because I think most of us, you know, most active level scientists are still very curious, right? We, we like to find out new things still, even if they weren’t in our previous understanding of how the world worked. And so, I try to take advantage of that as I go along, and combine new things I, I try to look at what’s new in different fields. So, I actually read like the medical literature sometimes just to find out, Oh, what are people doing in this world that maybe I could learn something from, to apply to plants even? I think it’s important to be very open minded to that. And it can be frustrating, right? Because people use different terminologies or you know, you’re unfamiliar with certain methodologies. But if you have a little bit of patience with yourself, you can expand into those regions and start to learn more. Yeah, and so, the intersectionality, you know, it can be a challenge, but it’s also really exciting. It’s important to find new folks to work with who you enjoy working with and can learn from, and that’s really how you push the field forward.

Maria
I definitely agree. Coming from a geology background, I completely agree with that. Because geology is one of the most like interdisciplinary type of fields. We work with all types of geosciences, like climate scientists, soil scientists, like in our department here. Yeah, our field is super collaborative and just coming from that oceanography background, I could see that for sure.

Graham
Oh, yeah. I tell most of my students who are interested in studying evolution and microbes, I say, one of the most important things you could take is a geology course. Because the biological world, when we think about it, working on our life spans, the exertions that are exerted on the biological world are on geologic timescales, and understand how we got to life on earth as it is right now without understanding geology.

Maria
Awesome. So, you mentioned students, of course, and I know you’re not teaching this semester, but what do you find most rewarding about working with students, and do you have a favorite class you teach?

Graham
Can I start with my favorite class?

Maria
Yes.

Graham
Okay, so I actually just started a new class that I gave last semester for the first time. It’s an upper-level seminar and it’s all about death.

Maria
Okay!

Graham
Yeah, so I think as biologists, we spend all of our time teaching things about life. How life comes about, about reproduction, and we really don’t teach or think much about the end of life. And that’s one constant of all life forms, all life forms die at some point. And so, the concept behind the course was to remove ourselves from the human experience. So, I didn’t want to think about humans. I didn’t want to think about the metaphysical aspects, you know, of why are we here, etc, but instead to look at how other forms of life experience death. Just to expand, so really, you’re still thinking about biology, right? But you’re, you’re approaching it from a different angle and thinking about the diversity. So, for instance, we read scientific manuscripts and looked at data about organisms. This one organism in particular, there is a jellyfish that is immortal. Any as it gets towards the end of its adult lifecycle, it turns back into a juvenile again. And it goes back and forth. And they’ve done this cycle hundreds of times. So why? how does that happen? That completely is unusual, right? That changes our thinking about life cycles, etc. Another thing we learned about is some of the molecular biology associated with really long-lived trees, things like Gingko trees, or Giant Sequoias and things like that. Those organisms live for so long. And they don’t have the markers of aging that we see in animal systems and other plant systems. They’re just not doing the same thing as everything else like that. And they’re not related to each other. They’re very distantly related to one another, like Ginkgo’s and Sequoias are different groups of plants entirely. And they have all these relatives that can’t do it, but somehow, they’ve gotten to a position where they can have extremely long 1000s of year lifespans. How does that happen? So, there’s two examples of kind of how we think about things differently. So, it’s fascinating. It’s really intriguing to me. And the students, I think, really kind of get a broad idea of the diversity of what’s out there. Much more so than just taking a botany and zoology course. So that’s my favorite course right now.

Maria
So, for my own edification, which jellyfish is this, that is, quote, unquote, immortal that Phoenix’s into its new life?

Graham
Yeah, oh, I can’t remember the species name right now, it doesn’t really have a popular name. It’s very rare. I would have to look up and send it to you. I don’t have it at my immediate recall.

Maria
I’ll keep a lookout. Oh, my gosh, wow.

Graham
Yeah, it’s super cool.

Maria
Yeah, for that first part, what do you find the most rewarding about working with students?

Graham
Yeah. So, the best part about working with students is honestly seeing students become independent and they’re their own thinkers. It is, by far the most amazing thing. Just to put this into perspective, I have two of my most memorable students when I first became a professor here, these two students, they’re both in one class of mine, they both are applying for and getting interviews for professorships this year. And that is the most rewarding thing, I think that I’ve ever experienced as an instructor. To see people go from learning about science, practicing with science, to being experts in their field and wonderful teachers on their own, it’s just phenomenal. And so that’s the really, the most rewarding thing is to see a student, you know, essentially struggle a little bit with new information, struggle with how their worldviews change, but gain their own tools, they had their own experiences, to be able to say, I can do this, like, I am able now to take new information, put it into perspective, and go in a new direction with it.

[music]

Maria
We hope you enjoyed hearing about the interesting facets of photosynthetic biology and the innovative ideas that come out of biological research. If you are as curious as I was about the immortal jelly fish Dr. Peers mentioned, it turns out, it is called Turritopsis dohrnii, a very small animal about 4.5 millimetres wide and tall, making it smaller than the average fingernail!

[music]

To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi. I’m Louis Noel, Longitude fellow and graduate of Rice University in Mechanical Engineering.

We are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, communication, and decision making.

For this episode, I spoke with Dr. Jacob Beckham. Jacob is a post-doctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A chemist by formal education, Jacob’s work also involves many other fields, like material science and biology. Join me in a conversation about his path in academia, communicating science, and leveraging creativity. Enjoy listening!

[music]

Louis
You earned your Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Georgia, and then advanced to Rice University for your PhD in chemistry as well. As of September 2023, you have been a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Could you describe what led you on a path in academia, as opposed to other scientific careers?

Jacob Beckham
Well, thank you, Louis, this is a question I get a lot, but it’s a really good one to start off with. And thank you so much for having me on, it’s real honor.

First off, I wanted to kind of set the stage for people by describing the different options people toss around when doing a PhD in the sciences. Generally, and there’s exceptions to this, there’s more options than just these three but if you want to continue doing research or scientific lab bench work, you kind of have three options: You have industry, national labs, and academia.

Industry is where the majority of graduate students in the sciences end up working. And there’s sort of a huge diversity in the jobs that people end up doing in industry, some are still in the laboratory, some are even doing a chemical synthesis. I’m from chemistry so that’s typically what I think of when people are going to these pharmaceutical companies. Some are doing product development for technology companies, some are in strategy, some are in sales. You get a really large diversity for the people going into industry. And it used to be that a lot of leading basic science research was done in the industrial sector as well back in the era of like Bell Labs in the 90s. I heard Dr. Rowland Pettit, in a previous episode actually mentioned this, some basic science still does happen in industry. But by and large, a lot of it has moved back towards academia. Really, the only sectors doing really impactful fundamental research on the industry side now are AI companies and some parts of the biotech industry. And even then a lot of companies would rather acquire a startup developing a new technology rather than develop it themselves.

Then there’s the National Lab side. So national labs are actually just this awesome middle ground between academia and industry that I feel like not enough people really appreciate. You get incredible work life balance, because everyone is working on a team. By and large, and they’re a full-blown adult, professional, they have their doctorate, they’re not a graduate student or a postdoc. Because of that, it’s a better place to keep organizational continuity, you don’t have to replace everyone, every five years. You have huge amounts of resources and money being handed around to tackle big challenges that sometimes aren’t tractable in places like academia or industry. So, I am pretty passionate about national labs, I spent about a year working at Lawrence Livermore, out in California during my undergrad. I consider that kind of the place that I fell in love with science. There’s really something wonderful about that national lab environment that I enjoyed. The tradeoff for the culture and resources, of course, is that you’re a little bit more limited as to the problems that you can work on. So, if things don’t have direct ties to national interests, or lab objectives, it’s a bit harder to justify what you would like to work on.

Then there’s academia. And frankly, when you make the pitch as to why you would want to be an academic over the other two options for logical types of people, I don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense. You make less money, especially at first, unless you start a bazillion companies off of licensed patents. The work life balance is worse. Most of the time you’ll have to move multiple times before finding a position that can be permanent. So, to be honest, when I started my PhD, I did not think I was going to end up in academia. Eventually, though, I think a few things clicked into place for me. One of my biggest strengths I consider about me as a scientist is my creativity and academia is the place where I feel like that can shine the brightest. Second, I really like being the person coming up with the ideas, the one that’s furthest upstream in the idea, you know, bog through commercialization. Third, I actually really enjoy teaching. And obviously, you get, you get to teach in multiple ways as a professor, which is what I want to do, you get to teach in a class, which I think I would really enjoy. And you also get to teach your graduate students every single day. I’ve started realizing that I really enjoyed watching my fellow graduate students encounter problems, and then find it in themselves to overcome that. I also loved like being relied on during that process. So that whole process of academically growing up and helping people to reach their full potential. I feel like I got a small taste of that at my PhD, and it made me really crave more of that. So, when I found myself like, volunteering to edit people’s papers for like, no reason I was like, Huh, okay, I think it would enjoy being a professor. Yeah, so sorry for the long-winded answer. I just wanted to make sure people understood the options, and that’s why I want to be in academia.

Louis
That was an excellent answer. I really couldn’t have thought of a better way to describe it. I mean, first of all, I didn’t even really consider national labs and it’s really interesting to learn about that middle ground.

Jacob
It is underrated as heck.

Louis
Yeah. And it’s open to a lot of people. I mean, as an undergraduate, like you said, that is a really good way to put your foot in the door, try things out. And as you know, the way we first met is you were trying something out. You went on the Rice Ignite Entrepreneurship track to learn more about commercialization of these research projects, and I’m really happy you landed on such an exciting journey in academia, and I know you’re going to be excellent teacher. You’re super creative, which we will discuss more in this.

Your published papers indicate a multidisciplinary approach converging the fields of chemistry, nanotechnology, material science, and biology. You have a significant emphasis on the synthesis and application of graphene-based materials, and the innovative use of nanotechnology for biological applications. Could you share two examples of your work that best illustrate the breadth of your research for lay audiences?

Jacob
I feel like your questions are so well crafted, like you can really tell that you dove into what I did. I just really appreciate that attention to detail.

Louis
I really appreciate you pointing that out. It takes a little work. So glad you recognized. Thank you.

Jacob
So, as I mentioned in my previous answer, I think I realized one of the things I really like about academia was that I can express my creativity and doing different kinds of projects. So, you covered it perfectly. It’s graphene-based materials, innovative use of nanotechnology for biological applications. So, I started with graphene, and then I sort of went into biomedical cell signaling and I sort of ended up doing a lot of neuroscience adjacent stuff, which is where I currently am in my postdoc.

The lab that I did my PhD in was the Tour lab at Rice University and Tour lab describes themselves as a carbon nanotechnology lab. That is super broad. But basically, if you can think of it, if it’s nanometer size, and it’s made of carbon, we’re interested in it. I joined that lab because I became fascinated with graphene. So, if you’re unfamiliar with it, graphene is a two-dimensional material, meaning that it’s literally a single atom thick sheet of carbon. You get some fascinating properties from these 2D materials. One of the big problems to graphene though, and the thing thus far that limited its commercial viability, it’s really difficult to make large amounts of material. So, our lab set about making new methods of making graphene, and we eventually came up with a pretty good one: joule heating. So, we found that if we took a carbon sample, and we float electrical current from a large capacitor bank through it, we generated heat. And even the direct passage of the electrical current plus that heat could drive chemical transformations. These transformations happen in milliseconds, and in carbon materials, they drove carbon to its most stable form, which was graphite. But since the material also cooled very rapidly, when the reaction was stopped, you could trap the carbon halfway through the formation of graphite, which resulted in graphene. This method was really interesting, for two reasons. One, you can make very large amounts of graphene very quickly, we were routinely making gram scale when other people in the world are struggling to make milligrams. And two, you can make it from almost any material, including waste materials, like rubber tires, plastic waste, and even food scraps. At one point, we had an undergrad literally just burn olive oil in a pan, bring it into the lab, and we made graphene out of it.

So, the second example, I promise, I’ll be shorter on this one. The second example was the use of molecular motors to control cell signaling. This was what you said about using nanotechnology and creative ways for biomedical applications. One of the earliest projects in the Tour lab sought to make molecules that work similarly to macroscale objects. Lately, we’ve been working on molecular motors. So, these are just molecules that spin when they’re exposed to light, and they exert mechanical force on their surroundings. So, there was a lot of work done in the 90s that showed that you could stimulate a signaling cascade, called a calcium wave by tapping the cell membrane with a micropipette. So, my work showed that you could do the same thing with a molecular size motor. This is really cool result because fundamentally, every drug in the field of pharmacology works by driving or inhibiting a signaling cascade using a chemical force. And here we are triggering a signaling cascade with a mechanical force. Functionally an entirely new paradigm in drug design. And this sort of added to a growing sentiment, especially in the field of what we call photo-pharmacology now, that you can do medicine with drugs that act by mechanical force, rather than chemical force.

Louis
That is just remarkable. I mean, the fact that you have the range, first of all, to go from just purely chemistry, but then go into material science with very physics heavy, and then apply that to biology and biomedical applications. It’s just, it’s really cool to see engineers and scientists like yourself, be creative about how they can maybe apply their work to several different types of fields. So that was a really good breakdown.

Jacob
I appreciate that.

Louis
It could be over a few people’s heads, but that’s great. I mean, it’s tough to distill this down any more simply. Yeah. Since 2020, you have authored nearly 40 papers published in world leading journals, which have amassed almost 500 citations in total. How do you manage involvement in multiple projects simultaneously? And what are your strategies to maintain your prolific output as a writer?

Jacob
Well, first off, I was, I was really lucky and really blessed to be in a productive group and surrounded by very talented peers. So, I do write a lot but I think I was only first author on maybe seven or eight of these papers. So, I mainly helped the other ones. I was just editing them or gathering data or coming up with ideas or experiments, or otherwise contributing to, you know, the novelty of the projects and making an intellectual contribution. So, a lot of that is because I had talented friends. And I do think that it’s important to manage collaborations well to invest in the people around you. So typically, I try to manage my involvement in that I have two to three projects of my own, and then a few deliverables for different projects going on all at once. So, kind of that’s really useful, because when I hit a roadblock on one, I can just work on the other and kind of keep the other one in the back of my mind, eventually, I’ll figure something out and come back to it. But both my ability to complete my own projects, and my ability to help others with their own work is fueled just by my ability to connect with my peers and coworkers. I consider it a core value for me to care about people intrinsically. And I hope I continue to be helpful, even if I didn’t benefit professionally from it. But as it turns out, I have benefited massively from it. So, in talking with people about the problems they encounter with their projects, I will very often see a way that I can contribute and take something off their plate, which will land me on their paper. And in talking to people about my own problems sometimes they do the same for me, which takes something off my plate makes me faster. So, this collaborative spirit, I think, was one of the key ingredients fueling my productivity and the productivity of the Tour lab as a whole. We talked about our work, maybe a little too much but that much dialogue and knowledge transfer overall into a really efficient group when it came to overcoming problems, there wasn’t a whole lot of waste, where we tried to reinvent the wheel. And there was a lot of helping. And I also think the last piece of that puzzle, honestly, was Dr. Tour, which was my advisor. I always like to tell this story. I was working on my thesis, and I was kind of trying to get Dr. Tour off my back, for like one of my last projects. So, I finished the draft thinking, Okay, this will buy me a few weeks. I emailed it to him at 9pm. He had it back to me fully read through and commented at 9am the next morning! I was just exasperated. So, I once thanked him for this efficiency actually. I was like, this is awesome, and thanked him and he said, don’t thank me, it’s my job. You would think it’s really easy to stay this focused and just keep your eye on the ball this hard, but it’s really not. There’s a lot of things that you have to keep track of doing science as a career. And it’s very easy to get lost in all the complexity of each project and funding. Everyone else just feels like they don’t have enough time in the day. Dr. Tour never makes you feel like that. I think it’s because of his ability to just keep his eye on the dang ball.

Louis
That’s so cool. It sounds like an incredible man. And you had a lot of great points in there. And I appreciate your perspective on collaboration. I think that’s really powerful for us for a lot of fields. And having that insight into how it works in academia is great. Do you ever experience difficulty in putting your ideas into words? Is there a structured or creative process you follow to break through writer’s block?

Jacob
I definitely do. I do experience difficulty putting my ideas into words. But I don’t think I really have a structured process. I think there’s a simple rule that I’ve told a lot of my friends: if you have writing to do, it won’t get done until you make it the only thing that you have to do. So, if I have like a big grant or a fellowship coming, I will just lock myself in a room until I have at least made progress with it. I’ll still try to do maybe like one or two simple experiments in a week. But complex things like learning new techniques where I feel like I have to use my whole brain, expend a bunch of willpower, I typically table them until I’ve at least made progress on the writing. And when I really have to do writing, I will make sure to set just a few days aside where I do nothing but lock myself in a room and write. And this probably doesn’t work for everyone. I know, career writers often describe like, Oh, I need to take a walk, I need to go do something else and then come back to it. That honestly, I think it’s kind of a reaction to a common mistake I feel like PhD students make. They just put off writing as long as possible because they stay in lab doing experiments. And like generating data is like a comfort thing for them. And I totally understand that. But you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not like trying to plan and structure your work because it has to go somewhere eventually. And I think this is gonna often lead to a lot of waste. So, I think it’s better to begin with the end in mind, which sometimes means writing before you’ve even begun, like doing certain experiments, just identifying goals. And I also think this process sharpens the link between your thinking and writing brain and it makes it easier to write a paper when it actually comes down to it.

Louis
Yeah, I like that analogy. And I can see that you have a lot of discipline, and some people may lean on some of their other characteristics to you know, get through that wall of writing. It can be difficult and It’s really interesting learning about how each person deals with that.

Jacob
Yeah, I think it’s important to know yourself for sure.

Louis
Speaking of writing, in January of 2019, you posted your first blog on a website you created, named Distilling Science. Since then, you and several other contributors have also posted blogs aligned with its mission statement, which is to, quote, “improve communication between scientists and the public. To highlight exciting new frontiers and technology, and to empower non-scientists with information on problems of great societal importance.” At Longitude dot Site, we share a similar mission with this podcast. I’m eager to learn about the inception of Distilling Science and your philosophy regarding the importance of science education and communication.

Jacob
Man this just brings a smile to my face seeing you’d like quote, my, the website, really the mission statement. I love it. 21-year-old Jacob was so cool. I miss him.

So, first of, this podcast is a really, really cool idea. I really enjoyed the episode with Rowland obviously, because I love Rowland. You guys have some really interesting guests coming in and dropping like a lot of valuable knowledge. I really like to tell the story about Nathan Zohner, when it comes to like, describing what led me to start Distilling Science.

Nathan Zohner was, I think like 18-year-old kid in 1997, who was doing a science project. And he walked around telling people, have you heard about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide? And they were like, No, what’s that? And he would say things like it’s been found in the body of every single dead person ever. And the Nazis used in their camps. And if you know anything about chemical nomenclature, you’ll know that dihydrogen monoxide means H2O, which is water. And Nathan Zohner just walked around telling people true facts about water and got them to sign off on a petition banning water. Just the fact that like this kid could walk around telling people truths, and dangerously mislead them made me think a lot about what about people with an agenda? What about people who aren’t being truthful? What about people who will just flat out lie to your face? What can they do? And the internet does not help because false information spreads faster, more prolifically than truth, true information online. So, all of this led me to think that in an era of growing mistrust, scientists need to talk directly to people. So Distilling Science is built on the idea that the best people to share and talk about scientific discoveries with scientists themselves. It never quite became a viral hit. And it’s been kind of dormant. But I think it peaked at the right time, I think we were able to actually do some really good work, and communicating first, some essential truths about Coronavirus and second, diving into the actual data behind both the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines. So, I think, at first, it was just a cool way to talk about my research and things that I wanted to study in grad school. And then it really became sort of a tool for combating misinformation. I think that the best people to communicate with the public are scientists. And I think that that link is almost maybe weaker than it has ever been. I think that social trust in general is still very low. And I think that scientists need to be asking themselves, what can we do to help this? What can we do to change this?

Louis
Well, I think you’re an excellent mouthpiece for the scientific community, because your curiosity is just overflowing seems like and you’ve had this drive to just figure things out, and the fact that you took matters into your own hands, and then shared with everyone, it’s not easy and doesn’t, you know, happen in the blink of an eye, it takes time.

Jacob
Oh, yeah. 100%. I’ve thought about various ways to bring it back eventually, but I think that Longitude Sound Bytes might take the space for me. You guys keep bringing experts on just to talk directly to the people.

Louis
Yeah, we can fill that. We can help build up. Some things, they run their course and, you know, they have their time to shine and then it’s time to shelve them, you know, hang them up a good note, and that’s totally okay too.

Jumping to question number six. Some might think fields like science, technology, engineering, and math, lack of creativity due to the black and white nature of their governing laws. However, creativity often drives breakthrough innovations in those fields. What are modern methods of incorporating creativity into research? And could you share an example?

Jacob
Absolutely. So, Louis, have you ever heard of a guy named Dan Pink?

Louis
I have not.

Jacob
So this was actually the first ever research project that I did. I watched this YouTube video in high school, called The Theory of Motivation. It was a TED Talk by Dan Pink, who has a book called The Theory of Motivation. And he basically set out to make the case that modern incentive theory so the idea that if you pay people more, they’ll do better work does not work for what he called 21st century problems. And 21st century problems encapsulate everything that you put in this question, science, technology, engineering, math, also, literally just anything that requires above base level thinking. And to make this case, he talks about some science that was done in the 1950s called the Candle Problem. You’re presented with a box of tacks and a candle. And you’re told that you have to adhere the candle to the wall. So, people will try various things. They’ll try to melt the side of the candle and stick it to the wall, it doesn’t work. And they’ll try to tack the candle to the wall, it doesn’t work. The solution is to overcome a cognitive bias called functional fixedness. And see the box not just as a receptacle for the tacks, but an actual holder for the candles. You put the candle in the box, you tack the box to the wall. That’s how you solve the candle problem. So basically, the idea is to solve this problem, you have to think about it in a little bit out of the box way you have to think creatively, to overcome a cognitive bias.

Every problem in science, technology, engineering, and math could be encapsulated as a candle problem. You need creativity to overcome it. You need to think out of the box. Science is not this like straightforward thing. You are literally trying to discover something that no one has ever done. So, you need to think a little bit out of the box. So, in science, this can be looked at as who has the intellectual fearlessness to try something new, try something creative, and approach things in ways that like they’re intrinsically motivated to approach. That fuels creativity and I think that fuels great advances. I honestly think that most 21st century jobs require creativity. Otherwise, we’re all gonna get replaced by AI pretty soon anyway.

[music]

Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation was how passionate Jacob is about his work. The novelty of his research, and his encouragement to be intellectually fearless.

[music]

To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Shem Brown
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, I am Shem Brown, Longitude fellow from Rice University studying English. For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Christin Davis, who is the Head of Acting in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches Acting, Movement, and Voice. We started our conversation with Christin telling me about her passion for acting and education.

[music]

Shem
How did you know that you wanted to go into theater and teaching? Were they things you always kind of wanted to do, or did the realization sort of come out later?

Christin Davis
I’d say that as far as pursuing it professionally, it was definitely a realization that came about later. When I entered undergrad at Rice, I was an English major. And I don’t really know that I knew what I was going to do. I think I had an assumption that maybe I’d teach high school English because I have had a really wonderful high school English teacher. And I was like, I love that I’ll do that. And then I kept doing plays, and I was one of the coordinators of the Rice Players. And then I think it was junior year for a variety of reasons occurred to me that, Oh, I couldn’t try to do this as like my job job. And so, there was just a shift in thought for me. And so, I decided to give it a try. And the teaching was also not something that I was really pursuing actively, like, I wasn’t pursuing a path towards academia. I’ve feel like I’ve always been good at following my nose and saying yes to things that are interesting and are working well. And that’s kind of how I found myself where I am now.

Shem
That’s awesome. I think it’s true that English degrees, you can do a lot of things with them. They’re kind of very versatile. Do you have like a favorite play that you were a part of while you were at Rice? Is there one that just like, sticks out to you? Or were they all just your favorites?

Christin
I mean, they were all really wonderful in various ways and various reasons. I think, the one that probably helped me grow the most as an artist, and sort of towards the profession was the production of the Baltimore Waltz that the Rice Players did. I think that was my junior year. It’s a really challenging show, and out of any production that I’ve ever done, like in college and beyond, it’s the one that I wish I could do again, like as a grown person, and as someone who knows, you know, has so many more skills now than I had then. It was a three person show by the playwright, Paula Vogel. And it was directed by Mark Ramont, who was at Rice for just three years. It was really rigorous. And it was really hard work. And I think it was a really successful production. So that’s probably my favorite.

Shem
Is there, and this is sort of an expansion of that question, is there a project in your professional life that has maybe resonated or stuck the most with you?

Christin
Again, everything I’ve done has been a source of growth and joy. A play I did here in Austin, I don’t know, six years ago, or something like that, called the Drowning Girls has definitely been a highlight of my theatre career. Again, another three-person show it takes place in bathtubs. And so, we were like in water for the entire duration of the show. We got to play lots of different characters. And it’s a really stylized way of telling a story. It’s almost like a ghost story. That’s based on historical fact. So that was really exciting and began an ongoing collaboration with me and a small theatre company here called Theatre en Bloc that does a lot of really exciting work in Austin. And then film wise and TV wise, working on the HBO limited series Love and Death, a handful of years ago was certainly a career highlight. It was like, by far the biggest, biggest budget production I’d ever been a part of. I got to be on set for two months, which was the longest I’d ever been involved with a film or TV production. And so that was really, again, a great learning experience and also just really, really fun.

Shem
Yeah. HBO shows are so cool. So, I actually went and I watched Fault Line, the short film, and I really loved it. I was just wondering what was it like for you to work on it with like, you know, being in a short film having it set in Marfa, which, again, like just a wonderful place in Texas. I love it. Everyone loves it. What was the experience like for you?

Christin
That was also a highlight in a different way than the HBO show because it was really such an intimate process. I want to say that was the first time that I had played a mom on screen since becoming a parent and it was my first project after COVID And so it was just a lot. And also, you know, the subject material is really quite heavy. As soon as I read the script, I was saying to someone actually earlier this week, like I got the tingles. And for me, you know, when I say that I’ve been good at following my nose to kind of figure out what’s next in my life. It’s for me, it’s the tingles, like following the tingles. And so as soon as I read that script, I got the tingles. And I was like, Oh, I would love to be able to do this. And then, in the callback process meeting, Lauren Himmelvo, the writer and director, and her daughter, who was the lead in the show, I just really, really, really wanted to be part of it. I was cast in it, and we had a rehearsal process, which you don’t always get to do for on camera work. But it was really, really nice to be able to connect and develop a relationship with Izzy, who played my daughter. So that by the time we got to Marfa, it felt like, there was really a true family feel. You know, I love low budget productions. I did several in Houston before I went to grad school, and I’m a scrappy artist at heart. And so, I love like, the creative problem-solving question about, okay, how do we make this work. And the production was, you know, low budget in that way, but also, so cohesive and so beautiful, and so family oriented. Lauren, the director, her mother-in-law, and her sisters, were there, as it’s called craft services, like the people that provide the food on set, and so cooked these homemade meals every single day. And we would sit down for a family dinner every day, which again, is not usually how things are done, at least on sets that I’ve been on. And so, it’s just really had this wonderfully collaborative feel.

Being in Marfa was so beautiful. You know, the landscape was such a participant in the film. And we had some really wonderful moments of things that we couldn’t really plan for, because, you know, you hope for the sun to set in the right way, but you never really know you’re gonna get the shot. And so, we just had some beautiful moments of nature participating with us and us participating with nature in a way that really came together. And then a couple moments with the trains that we weren’t expecting. Because we didn’t know that schedule, we didn’t know when things were going to come by. And we just happened two days in a row to get these moments where the train came by, that we weren’t expecting. So like, but the shots towards the end, where the trains going in between us that we just happened to catch that. That moment was really special.

Shem
That was so cool. I was like, how did they know that this would happen? I was like, this is just so serendipitous, it feels like.

Christin
The train was serendipitous. Yeah, I can’t remember if we had a rough idea of maybe it was gonna happen or not. But I remember us being like, we hear the train, like drive!… and you either get those or you don’t get those, and we got it, which was really, really great.

Shem
Are there any sort of like processes of other creatives in your field that you’ve admired or learned from, like approaches to, you know, people’s art, you know, style of learning any of that?

Christin
Yeah, let me think about that for a minute. I love that question. You know, I’m very process oriented, as opposed to product oriented. And I think that’s why I’m in this field actually. Because for me, it’s the process of, first of all, my place in the process and my place in being part of a collaboration that is working to make something larger than the individual pieces. And so, my rehearsal process, my developmental process, and my teaching process is all very process oriented, as opposed to we’re trying to get to this place. I feel like a lot of my approach in that way, comes from a lot of the learning that I had at Rice. I was telling my students the other day, we were having all these discussions around AI and Chat GBT. And I believe me, I understand that like, there’s a lot of value and a lot of unknown and a lot that’s worth exploring in that world. And then there’s the English major part of me that has this argument, which is like, language is consciousness, or consciousness is language, or there’s a really reciprocal and symbiotic relationship there. Like as I figure out how I use the language to communicate my consciousness, I am also developing myself as a conscious creature, and so I can’t separate those. And so, I get really worried for like outsourcing my imagination and my ability to create myself in that way to an external source. And so, I feel like that was a really big piece of learning, I took from my studies in English that has made its way into my process as like a theatre artist and actor. That combined with I did a lot of religious studies classes at Rice. And, you know, I thought about, oh, maybe I’ll pursue English at the graduate level and teach English at the college level, or maybe I’ll, you know, travel the world and become a religious studies scholar. But for me, I always needed it, to come into my brain and then come out through my body in space. And I feel like that’s what being an actor has allowed for me to do is to synthesize those two really important pieces of learning, and then bring it into space with other people. And so, a lot of my influences are actually thinkers and philosophers, you know, spiritual writers, who are always exploring how creativity is a big part of what makes us human, and how we can harness that for the good. So right now, I’m really influenced by the writer, Adrian Marie Brown. I’ve been a big fan of Julia Cameron for a long time. And then as far as the people who are actually theater makers and artists. I don’t know I don’t really read like, I don’t read a lot about famous people or stuff like that, you know, but I love. I love new work. And I love helping people create new work. And helping writers and directors understand the actor’s process in helping to develop new work. from that vantage point of like, well, this is how like, my consciousness works as an actor. This is how my impulse works as an actor, and how then it comes through language into a script, since theater is mostly still a language based medium.

Shem
That’s, that’s really great. I think it’s, it’s actually great that you don’t, you don’t have to be like, I only read theoretical stuff about plays. So I love that. My next question was going to be about your process when approaching a new role, but I want to skip over it for a moment and go to this next one, which is about whether you’ve created any sort of like habit regarding mindfulness, privacy or solitude in regards to the increased speed of information, and the sense of like, artificial urgency, which you talked about a little with Chat GPT and other AI tools.

Christin
Yeah, that’s one thing that I feel like, I am hoping that I really offer my students as well. I’m always in practice in trying to understand what the best sort of practice for an actor, or this sort of artist is. You know, if you’re a violinist or a painter, the things that you can do to practice your craft are pretty apparent. There’s also a lot of stuff that we that is not maybe as apparent, but you know, you know what it is to practice scales as a violinist. And as an actor, it can be harder for especially young actors to understand well, how do I if I’m not working, how do I practice. And so, I do spend a lot of time thinking about questions like this, but yes, for myself, as I’ve got two young kids now, and I’m married, and so there’s like, my life is very full. And I am not always at the center of it. And so, I try to wake up early enough every day, so that I get to sit by myself with coffee, and a book of some sort that feels like it’s feeding me and nourishing me sort of on the levels that I was talking about earlier. And if I get those in, then usually I feel like it’s a pretty good start to my day as far as being able to be present and centered and responsive to whatever comes my way. And that’s great practice just for me as a human. That’s also really translatable to my work as an actor or as a teacher in the classroom. But anything also, that just helps me feel in creative flow. So if I like have time to sit down and play the piano, once or twice a week, working in my yard helps me feel just connected to the flow of stuff around me and through me, as opposed to feeling like I’m the person who does this in isolation. You know, to me, the most satisfying and interesting and magical part of being an actor is the relating and the not knowing what’s going to happen between two people who are encountering each other in a space and so any practice I have that keeps me kind of open to possibility is something that I find useful.

Shem
I liked what you said about even just going out and working in the garden like feeling tied back you know, to the earth to what’s going on, rather than sort of an almost robotic like, Okay, I have this and then this, and then those are the things I’m doing next. It feels very organic, at least to me, that’s what I’m hearing. Yeah, but just circle back on your process, you know, sort of when approaching a new role or project, do you have like a sort of more formalized way? Or is it just to kind of see where it takes you?

Christin
A little bit of both. I have a lot of different ways of approaching material that I know works kind of given the situation. Let’s say it’s not an audition, but it’s like, something I know, I’m going to work on. First and foremost, I let the language work on me, and affect me how it’s ever it’s going to affect me. And then sometimes I’ll make notes about thatn or sometimes I’ll just, you know, take stock of sort of how that affects my body. Do you know the writer Helene Cixous? She has this really amazing essay called Coming to Writing. I read it when I lived in London and did a semester studying abroad there. And to me was, it’s something that helps me translate how my work studying English was actually my work as an actor. It’s very much about how writing can be an expression of the body, and then the body can be an expression of writing. And so that’s one reason I feel like acting to me ultimately made more sense than, you know, going into academia for English is because I need it to come through my body and into space. And so, I let the language work on me, whether it makes me feel a certain way or makes like, my body needs to move in a certain way. Then sometimes if I feel like I know who this person is, I don’t have to do a whole lot of brain work. And I might just go right to like imagining. Something I did for Fault Line actually, which I don’t, I think I had done this before but I spent a lot of time doing it because that a really long drive out to Marfa was, I created memories as my character around my husband, you know, who in the film has died. And so I spent the car trip just remembering our relationship. And that gave me a lot to work with once I was on set, which was really interesting. I had never done that in such an intense way before. And then I don’t know if you’re familiar with Stanislavski, who was sort of, you know, founder of modern acting, in some ways, he has a way of looking at a script or just some useful questions to ask. The question that I spend the most time on, once I’m in the rehearsal room working is this question of how do I want my partner like whoever I’m in the scene with, like, how do I want them to respond to what I’m saying? And, and this is what I teach. What that does, as the actor is that it makes it not about me, right? It makes it not about like, Oh, I’m feeling this or like, this is how this character is. But rather, I’m using the language to do something because there’s something that I really want from the person that I’m talking to whether or not I’m conscious of it. So that’s a really fundamental part of my process.

[music]

Shem
We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation was what Christin said about acting coming through the body, into space—letting the language work on her. I just thought that was a very thoughtful, beautiful way of putting it, that idea.

[music]

To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

Hi, this is Jim Whitehurst, president of IBM. And I want to spend a few minutes talking about the importance of communication.

Now we all know that communication is vitally important to create context and ensure that teams can be well coordinated. But I want to specifically address one area of communication that I think is becoming more and more important, as the context in which we live and the complexity in which businesses operate continues to increase.

In the past, I think many leaders looked at communication as a way to provide clarity for what people need to do. And going back, you know, 100 years when many people were doing very rote tasks, providing clear, detailed, specific guidance in what people did was really important. Because ultimately, the sum total of work was many people doing these specific tasks that kind of added up to the whole goal of the company. But if we look, and I guess in that context that the overall strategy of the company was less important to communicate down to the person on the front line, because as long as the person on the front line did the right thing, in total, the company kind of added up to meeting its strategic goals.

But in the world we live in now, which is much more complex and moving much more quickly, all of a sudden, if a task can be truly specified, it’s probably been automated. So the jobs that are left that we’re asking people to do require creativity. They require kind of judgment. They require initiative. And so now, when we think about communication, I would argue that it’s more important to have crystal clear clarity on the corporate strategy. And we frankly, for most jobs, we actually want to leave a degree of ambiguity in the specific work tests required so that people can, knowing the corporate context and the strategy and observing the kind of specific situation they’re in, apply the appropriate judgment. So all of a sudden communication has gone from, hey, let me kind of broadly, but at a kind of generic level, talk about strategy and get really specific on tasks that are really specific on corporate strategy and get a little bit blurrier on tasks to really enable people to perform at their best. And I think that’s important not only in terms of enabling people to do their best work, but communication also becomes a key point of motivation. When people understand how their work fits into the whole and how it progresses the strategy and ultimately, the success of their organization, people are typically more engaged, more motivated than simply doing something and trusting that that somehow is going to have the right output.

So again, in today’s world ensuring people have the appropriate context and can connect what they’re doing to the importance as a whole is a critical communication task that every leader needs to lead and champion.

I hope you found this helpful. Thank you very much for listening.

[To hear more of Jim’s views on culture and open leadership follow him on LinkedIn to see his video series, “An Open Conversation with Jim.”]

Thank you, Jim, for sharing such wonderful insights on the rapidly changing dynamics of what constitutes productive workplace communication.

I definitely agree that as the world we live in changes, the criteria for “optimal behavior” must also follow, and this definitely applies to communication – arguably one of the most crucial skills we can have, especially in such an interconnected world where teams often make up the fundamental systems in companies. And, as you highlighted, what it means to have “effective communication” has undoubtedly changed as well, with the emphasis shifting from clarity on specific tasks-at-hand to clarity on overarching corporate strategies or goals.

I think it is really interesting that you mentioned the impact of automation on the nature of jobs, as most remaining jobs, and likely future jobs, place much greater emphasis on creativity and judgement for each individual than in the past, when perfect execution to precise instruction was the key to success. Hence, modes of communication must adapt correspondingly as well.

I also think that the idea you mentioned that this new form of communication enables people to do their best work is really interesting, and I definitely agree. I think that with greater flexibility and autonomy, people are now better able to showcase their full potential and are encouraged to utilize their creativity to solve problems and address tasks-at-hand according to their best judgment without limitations from detailed instructions. Hence, I think this is definitely advantageous for companies when people are able to exercise their unique skill sets and backgrounds towards a common goal.

Hi, I’m Sanjula Jain, an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Health Services researcher based in the Washington DC area.

Communicating effectively, whether it be in a professional or personal setting, is no easy feat. I’ll preface this conversation by saying that I am by no means a communication expert. In fact, it’s a skill I practice daily because in my opinion, being a strong communicator requires continuous reflection and learning.

As I reflect on many of my own experiences, ranging from presenting data, and advising clients, to mentoring students and teaching executives, I found that being able to contextualize and shape your message to the audience is essential. As someone who spends a lot of time leveraging healthcare data to tell stories and influence decisions, I have learned that effective communication is not about how impressive my graphs look, but about knowing the right amount of information to share, in what way and to the right audience.

Every individual or group that you communicate with has a unique learning style. Some prefer to receive information visually, whereas others might gravitate towards listening or hands on experiences. Some of us process information in bite sized chunks, while others need as many details as possible.

For example, when I present healthcare landscape trends, I often speak about the growing role of the federal government in paying for medical services. The first time I presented this trend to a group of C suite hospital executives, I showed a simple graph visualizing the significant increase in hospital revenues from Medicare and Medicaid over the last 10 years. This was a trend that had not been widely published, and had important implications for how these executives thought about their go-forward strategy. But the response was not what I was expecting. My very colorful, well labeled simple graph was greeted with blank stares. Finally, one executive raised their hand and asked how this was relevant to their hospital. When I answered I got a few head nods, but by that point it was too late. I had already lost their interest and my message was lost in translation. I then realized that my approach was more suitable for how I would present a concept to my intro to health policy students, but not exactly for an executive decision maker. I had failed to shape my data message in the context of what a hospital executive valued information that was relevant to the hospital’s clinical and financial performance. The next time that I presented the same trend to a group of C suite executives, I employed an entirely different approach. This time, I called on each executive in the room to share aloud what percent of their hospital revenue came from Medicare and Medicaid. Then I asked them what the number was 10 years ago. I wrote all the numbers up on the whiteboard and drew a line in real time showing the change in revenue over that 10-year period. But I didn’t just stop there. I then began asking the executives how government payments were currently affecting their hospitals bottom line. Almost immediately, the executives began asking questions and furiously taking notes. So why did the same trend presented to the same audience get two different reactions? Well, in my interactive white-boarding session, I was able to make the data relevant to each executive by applying the trend to their specific business objectives. In other words, I was finally speaking their language.

So if I were to leave you with one tidbit, it is that the same piece of information can relay different messages depending on what language you use. Being an effective communicator means always carefully considering what different audiences need to hear and how they want to hear it. Whenever your audience changes, so should the language you use.

Thank you, Sanjula, for sharing such amazing insights from your career path.

I think that during the pandemic, we all got to feel the importance of effective communication since a lot changed in our lives. Since March, I can really see the difference of how we have to interact depending on situations and audience. It is really important to be able to carry the right message not only for individuals, but also for companies and industries. And even though many things have gone back to the old, there are still some measures taken right now. One of them I got to follow was the Paris Fashion Week to be held virtually and for some even pre-recorded. So many designers have to come up with a unique way to present their new collection, and most importantly, in the way they wanted their audience to receive the story and mission of their brand. After all, fashion shows goal is to reach a global community and understand what their needs are, and how they’d like to present themselves and give the designers the opportunity to communicate with their audience. This offers a life experience for interested people to see a designer’s point of view before their eyes. So the seasonal fashion weeks are the essential form of communication for designers’ successful storytelling. Lastly, I want to talk about one of my personal favorite solutions for the streaming of the show, which was a virtual reality option, making the whole experience more lifelike and portraying the message and atmosphere in the best way as possible.

Hi, this is Dan Cohen. I’m an attorney with K&L Gates in Washington DC, and a member of the Longitude advisory board. I’m so encouraged by the work that Longitudes fellows are doing, because I think connecting smart, passionate, curious students, with leaders in their professional fields of interest is a great recipe for success. And for the development of future leaders in fields, from engineering, to medicine, to law, to politics, to whatever it is, I think it’s a great way for the next generation to really succeed. And I think it’s really important for our current leadership and successful individuals in different parts of our economy to think critically about what’s made them successful, how to continue being successful, and sharing that knowledge with others while they refine it and further development themselves. And for all those reasons, I am very thrilled to be a member of the advisory board.

It’s also my honor to be part of the podcast series. I’ve been asked to talk a bit about communication, my philosophy on communication, and some practical tips. As an attorney, my whole life, my whole career and value-add is the ability to communicate, not broadcast, and I’ll talk about that in a bit more depth.

But to give you a little more background on myself, I’m a graduate of Rice University. I graduated in 2014. I graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2017.

During law school, I was on Virginia law review. I interned with the Virginia Attorney General’s office, the United States Senate Committee on Banking, as well as my current law firm K&L Gates, which is an international full service, one stop shop firm. We assist clients in every industry with every type of legal question from tax, corporate transactional merger, M&A to regulatory oversight, supervision, investigation, to insurance, litigation, the list goes on and on. But working at K&L Gates with my really talented colleagues in 46, or 47, offices across the globe, has really impressed upon me the need to communicate and not broadcast.

To me, broadcasting is disseminating or sharing information. Now, broadcasting can sound good, and in some circumstances it is. It’s important to share information. But when you broadcast information, you’re not necessarily considering whether your audience is receiving that information in a manner that’s accessible, digestible, and can be operationalized or put into action for their strategic purposes. So my definition of communicate and what I try to develop and utilize in my own practice, is sharing information in a manner that my client can best deploy that information for their own use, or said another way, sharing information in a way that my client can use it strategically.

What’s critical in the practice of law is understanding what your client is trying to achieve and understanding the facts surrounding that goal. Because the law is very fact-specific. The same law can apply or not apply in 10 different situations if the facts and the strategy are different. But what’s critical is helping clients think through the intersection of their business model and the law, and how to achieve their goals. You know, whether that means creating a new business model, partnering with someone else, designing contracts in certain ways, deploying new policies or procedures. The “what” is very critical to understanding the “how,” and the how is what clients really need me to communicate. They need me to provide them information in a manner that they can take it, and then create new systems or hire new folks or enter into new partnerships so that they can provide very real services or goods to very real people. And at the bottom line, it’s a practical exercise in everything, it’s not just about sharing what the law is, theoretically, it’s about showing very serious nuts and bolts on how it applies. And the only way I can do that is through communication, not through broadcasting. So I have three tips on how to communicate. I think these tips are general applicability. So don’t worry if you’re not an attorney or you know you’re not working with an attorney.

Though in every field, every business, you’ll eventually work with attorneys either in house or outside counsel. So hopefully these tips can help you in your communications with attorneys so they can serve you as best they can. So my first tip is be clear on expectations. Again, the whole point of a legal service is to help the client put something into practice because of a legal obstacle or challenge. So understanding what it is the client is trying to do when they’re trying to do it, what logistical, what operational or structural features of the client’s, you know, business or just activity in the case of a non for profit entity, what they’re doing, how that applies to the law, and how that applies, you know, in their everyday challenges.

As an example, I work with a lot of banks and these banks have questions about what types of financial services they can provide in what states to specific types of consumers, and what the terms of those services have to be. Similarly, I, I work with companies who buy and sell cryptocurrency as a business. So I help them think through how to model their business, how to provide services in a manner that meets their strategic goal. You know, whether that goal is providing a particular type of service or providing service to a particular marketplace. So be clear on expectations, which includes understanding the facts put before you about the client, but understanding what it is they’re trying to do. So if you have a client who’s trying to give loans to a particular group of people in a particular state, don’t give them advice about providing a different type of service. So just again, be clear, you know, people want an answer to question A don’t get them answered a question B.  Even more practically, understand what the deliverable is, you know, again, part of expectations is meeting what’s asked of you. And you could put forth the best presentation, the best brief, the best speech possible, but if what your client needs is something else. So for instance, if you write a 20 page memorandum that’s very intense in depth and helpful in explaining the legal issue or explaining the use case or business model, or you know, if you put together a dataset explaining the data set, whatever it is, but what your superior, what your client needs, is a high level overview, or what they need is contractual language that they can share with a business partner. Or, you know, a more philosophical thematic discussion for a regulator to understand what you’re trying to achieve. You’ve not met the expectations. You have not communicated in an effective manner, and thus you’re not serving your client or your audience well. So whenever I start a new project, I always communicate with my superior or with the client directly on what problem they need an answer to. And in what form do they need that answer so they can use it best. So often, that means I’ll write a memo. Often, that means I’m just writing an email with bullet points. Sometimes it means I’m drafting a contract. Sometimes it means I’m drafting a letter to a third party. And other times it means I’m writing a regulation or statute for consideration. So tailor your communications to the expectations given to you.

Number two, whatever you do, put the bottom line right up front. We live in a high tech, fast pace world where information is constantly moving back and forth, facts are changing, opportunities are coming and going. People just do not have the time. And there’s increasing information inundation because we’re connected 24/7 to each other  through the internet and our phones, and the ability to share too much information is too easy. So people naturally become tired. So, put the information right up front. Help people understand the answer to their question right at the beginning, so if they read nothing else, they know what the answer is and how to put into practice to meet their strategic goals.

Do that by being clear, be concise, and at a high level, put in important caveats. Don’t let people come away with the wrong impression because you want it to be clear on your conclusion. Help people to understand if your conclusion has caveats what they are, and again, you can always go into more detail, you know, in a supplement further on and whatever deliverable you’re giving, but make sure people understand what the answer is and what to do right up front.

And third, I really encourage you to communicate how the information you’re providing fits into your client, your audience’s strategy. Again, don’t make people do the work they’re asking you to do. You know, especially if you’re a junior person, this is an opportunity to shine. Take that extra step, don’t just tell them what the answer is, tell them what it means to them, how they can take it and use it, and give them practical next steps. So often what I will do if I’m asked a legal question, I’ll give an answer. So for instance, I work with various companies seeking insurance recovery for contamination of their products, so someone produces a food product that gets contaminated. They’ll come and ask me, “Does my insurance policy cover this?” Of course, I need to tell them what the answer is, yes or no? If yes, how much? If no, why? But what I need to tell them is, “Yes. And here’s how you’re going to get the money,” or “No, but here’s how we can get you some recovery. We need to take these steps. We need to talk to these people in this way, and we need to make our case in this way. And we need to avoid, you know, certain issues or certain facts or address them as they come.” So if you want to be a successful communicator, it’s not enough just to answer the minimum question. Help people think through the strategy. Help them take what you’ve learned, and especially in law for anyone here who’s either interested in being a lawyer or if you’re working with lawyers. Make sure that you tell them (a) how the law affects their business model or their business activity, but (b) even more importantly, what they need to do concretely to comply and to use the facts to help advance their goals as a business, or whatever activity they’re doing.

So thanks so much for your time. I hope this is useful. If you have any questions you can reach out. My email is Dan.Cohen@KLGates.com again, I’m an attorney here in Washington DC. So the caveat, of course, is none of this is legal advice, though I don’t think it sounds like legal advice, but just in case. And thank you so much for your interest in Longitude. If you’re a student and you want to get involved, please reach out, if you are professional and want to be involved also reach out. We’d love for resources, but communicate, don’t broadcast your interest, you know, help us help you get involved. So thanks so much. I hope this is useful. Please check out all the other resources and good luck in your careers.

As a lawyer, Dan is often responsible for delivering actionable information to advise his busy clients about their complex legal concerns; therefore, it is incredibly important that his communication with clients is efficient and effective. Daniel described some of the common pitfalls that a broadcaster makes compared to an effective communicator. He provided three great pieces of advice to become an effective communicator. The first being clear expectations. The second was to prioritize important information and the third was to adapt your message to fit your audience.

In hearing his advice regarding communication, I believe that many connections can be drawn between his philosophy toward communication and effective leadership. After all, part of what distinguishes a boss and a leader is to be able to communicate goals rather than broadcast demands.

In my experience with the Army, I have been under the command of both communicators and broadcasters. Often, the most common downfall for leaders in the Army is that they fail to provide the why. The why is so important because, without it, soldiers tend to act out of selfish nature. Sure, they may still get the task done, but only because they are forced to do it. This demeanor often produces incomplete, late, or sub-standard results.

On the other hand, a leader that provides the why correctly will have convinced their subordinates that the task needing to be done is necessary to meet their personal goals. Essentially, they have incentivized them. This can be done in many ways, but the point is that it should always be attempted whenever possible. 

Connecting back to Dan’s ideas about communication, the why that I spoke about earlier is greatly associated with his third piece of advice, which is to adapt your message to the audience. His example about taking the extra step to not only provide accurate analysis of law but deliver actionable advice to support a client is sound advice for anyone. We should always consider how our message will be useful to our audience as a means to retain their attention but also to create a more effective and efficient message.

Now, I know I learned something from Dan and I hope you did too. I highly suggest that you practice this idea of communication versus broadcasting. Whether it’s with your cat, a professor, or even your boss, you will begin to see positive results using this advice. Well, maybe not as much with your cat.

My name is Julia Guez. I’m a writer and translator based in Brooklyn. And by day, I serve as the Senior Managing Director of Design and Implementation at Teach for America, New York.

What is communication anyway? What’s important when it comes to making it work well, on the page, or when you’re in front of somebody in a room, or a Zoom room, as the case may be?

It’s not simply verbal.

It’s a mix of the verbal and the nonverbal. It’s not simply what you share. It’s what you take away. And yet, for so long, I thought the real emphasis was on finding the right words, framing them clearly and directly enough. Meaning that I could check off all the boxes, when it comes to communicating effectively. Communication in my mind is all about exchange, energy, information, feeling, certain tones, certain textures, certain timbers of voice. They all register, somehow. Whereas before, I used to think about it in terms of lines, vectors, meanings with certain velocities. I think about it more complexly now. I think about it in terms of flows. I think about it in terms of circles and swirls. And I don’t simply think that’s the case when you’re engaging somebody sitting across from you. I think that’s true on the page as well.

About a year ago, Four Way Books published my first collection of poetry. And a lot was made of three poems that seemed to give the reader a lot of room. That was by design. One piece was composed of a single sentence, and another, a single word. The final piece in the collection is a title that drops off into the blank space of the page. It means to be quiet enough to give readers room enough to find their way in, to bring and to make their own meanings in ways that I think really healthy, really vibrant communication does. It invites somebody in and it gives that somebody this sense that you’ll be listening. And that’s where my emphasis is these days. It’s on listening. It’s on attending to what is said and what isn’t. It’s in attending to the body, and the breath of the person who’s speaking. It’s attending to what they say. When they say, how they are, where they are, when they bring me into their thinking, their feeling, their practice. That’s where I endeavor to be most skillful, is in holding space that way, in doing that quietly and patiently with a lot of care. And I mean, to do it in person, and on the page, exploring the possibilities of saying less, saying what I need to say and only half formed ways, saying what I need to say and then seeing what emerges in the interplay between my ideas, and the ideas that someone else may offer, if they trust me in this communication, to make room for them.

Skimming through Julia’s poetry really helped me to better understand her message. She defines two skills that enable effective communication: listening and attending. So, we should attend to other person’s thoughts and listen to them, rather than, let’s say, elaborately picking words and try to use them the right way. Similar to her still-life imagery in her poetry, she thinks that we all should listen and enable other people to let us into their thinking and be mindful to let others do the same. With this, we can enable ourselves to convey more than what’s being said. She also stresses that there is not a checklist of things we should check away, we should instead be mindful of small things such as textures, energy, and, timbres of voice that accompany personal communication.

Julia also warns us to be mindful of the space people create as they speak, as in, the feeling they emanate, how they speak and use their body. Just like the title that drops off into the blank whiteness of a poem’s page, one should give others the room to let themselves in and contribute to the act of communication. We tend to think that communication is by nature an active process, but what Julia helps us realize is that the important part of it is passive, as in listening and attending whoever we are communicating with. This made me remember people who only likes to talk about themselves or divert the conversation to the topics they like to talk about. And you would appreciate that it is very challenging trying to talk to people like these, now I see what they lack is the passive part of communication, attending and listening. In her words, communication “…is not simply what you share. It’s what you take away.”

Good evening. My name is Richard Rock. I’m the president and CEO for Rock, LTC and Senior Living. We are a technology company located in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. And our business focuses on delivering technology solutions to retirement communities that are providing independent and assisted living services to seniors here in the province of Ontario.

I want to talk to you briefly about communication. I have been a sales and marketing executive in network communications for over 30 years. And the definition, generally, of communication is the imparting of information, the exchange of information and/or news. And in networking, basically, we’re looking at how people are communicating not only to a group, but also on one to one.

I normally break up communication into receiving and delivery. And then there’s a number of skills that overlap both receiving communication skills and delivery communication skills.

So on the receiving side, you have active listening, open mindedness, body language, and feedback. On the delivery side, you have being concise and clear, in terms of the message you’re delivering, being confident with that message, and the type of medium that you would be using to deliver that message.

And there’s a couple of communication skills I consider high-level communication skills, such as empathy, friendliness, and respect. These types of skills overlap both receiving and the delivery communication skills, and would make you a better “listener,” a better conversationalist, and you would really create a space where people would want to engage you in conversation. So it’s always good to practice and continue to be aware of your communication skills on both the receiving and delivery fronts.

I’m a former Olympic athlete, and the relationship between an athlete and coach has to be strong, and it has to be a trusting relationship. And communication is the foundation for that relationship. Without a strong communication between the coach and athlete, basically, you can’t move the needle forward, you cannot get to where you’re achieving your goals because of course, there’s a gap there in the understanding. So at any level, whether it be in sport, or in the workplace, or even in, in life, in general, communication is going to be key and those type of skills, right, will make you a better person, and basically help you move that needle forward for not only yourself, but also for the people around you. And if you’re in business, definitely for your business, okay? So practice your communication skills. Try to master them, and as you do so, you’ll find that you’ll be you know, more engaging and more involved in better conversations. Okay, good luck.

Thank you, Richard for those wise words.

Not only does Richard draw attention to the importance of building communication skills, but also to the importance of communication in general. The best progress is often accomplished with the help from others. And it doesn’t hurt that humans are naturally social creatures. We’re in a unique time in history where we’re able to connect more than ever, thanks to technology. Social media, phone calls, and various messaging systems that so many of us interact with on the regular are prime examples of our social nature and how we communicate. With COVID we’ve been put in a situation where our new means of communication have really had to flex their capabilities by making up for a large portion of our interactions. The fact that we can maintain such discourse is an impressive feat. From the Adopt-a-Grandparent campaign to the website Making Authentic Friends which connects people with disabilities, we are surrounded by different means of communication and I only see us getting more adept at the skills required in each setting.

I’m Amanda Studebaker, and I’m currently a Service Delivery Technical Manager at Baker Hughes, living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

In my current role, I lead a team of about 40 cross-functional engineers, spread across 6 countries. Working as a people leader for the first time has given me the opportunity to reflect on what values I think are crucial to a team, and today I want to talk about one that I think is especially important, which is responding to failures.

When I started my career, I went on what we call a “breakout job,” which is your first time to be the lead engineer at a field site and calling the shots. Now, the job went terribly. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. Most of the problems we solved quickly, but one of the problems compounded and a decision I made directly caused downtime for our customer, which one of the worst things you can do as a field engineer. I got the problem fixed, sorted it out with the customer, and then all that was left to do was call my boss…which is what I was really dreading the most, as this was the first time I had really messed up at work and I was afraid I had let him down.

When I told my boss what happened, he was silent for a moment, and then just asked two questions. One; “Did you learn from it?” and two;  “What will you do differently next time?” and then he moved on. I hung up the phone. I was quite shocked, as I had been beating myself up all morning and was prepared for a long lecture from him, which never ended up happening.

A few years later, as I was preparing to move into my current role, which would put me in charge of a large team, I emailed this same old boss for some advice.

Out of many things that he wrote me, one message stood out, and it was something like this: He said, “Some people won’t care too much when they mess up. Your job is going to be to make them care more. Other people are going to beat themselves up when they mess up. Your job will then be to build them back up. Make sure that you are taking the time to figure out which one you need to do.”

As I read this, memories of my mistake in the field came rushing back, and suddenly his response to me back then made a lot more sense.

I share this story because I believe that a major key to a high-performing team is that everyone takes ownership for their results, and this can only be achieved if people are not terrified to make mistakes. I tell my team, if you make a mistake and you own up to it and have a plan to not do it again, then we can overcome it and this is how we get better. On the other hand, if you cover it up, or even worse, if you are found pointing the finger at someone else, then we are going to have a major problem. To create a strong culture, it requires that every single person on the team treat mistakes as steps towards improving, instead of something to be avoided at all costs.

Thank you, Ms. Studebaker, for sharing this personal story.

Listening to this insightful reflection, I was impressed by the profound lesson that shines through. That is, owning up to what you do is important not just to you personally, but to the entire team you are working with.
From my own team experiences as a student, I can add that taking responsibility for your actions is not just beneficial to the performance of a team, but creates the most ideal circumstances for everyone’s creativity to blossom. The calm and constructive response that she received from her boss after owning up to a mistake is an example of how we all wish to be treated by someone in a leadership position.
It also goes to show how often we humans have the tendency to beat ourselves up over things, but when we look back, we see that we were looking at it from the wrong perspective, and that a different perspective can soothe us.
As an aspiring engineer myself, it is valuable advice to not be afraid of mistakes. Instead, we should view mistakes as an opportunity to learn. And perhaps the biggest mistake one can make is to not realize that every mistake is an opportunity to grow.